


Warning Shot

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, M/M, Violence, possessive!Barnes, sub!Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 22:09:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1704320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which several people get stabbed, a few more are shot, and the Winter Soldier reminds everyone exactly who Steve Rogers is. Or was that <em>whose</em> Steve Rogers is?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Warning Shot

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this](http://stevebucky-fest.dreamwidth.org/307.html?thread=889651#cmt889651) prompt on dreamwidth, about the Winter Soldier sabotaging Steve's dates.

The first time Steve asked Sharon out, they were parachuting out of a helicopter into enemy fire. Her CIA extraction mission for a compromised diplomat had coincided - collided, more accurately – with their hunt for any information on the Winter Soldier. Now they were all storming the embassy in Algiers, trying to save files and capture yet another HYDRA operative.

It would take at least another hour to finish the fight, even with the new wings Stark had made for Sam, and the ferry to Marseilles didn't leave until morning. There was no point in searching for Bucky. If he had ever been in Algiers, he would be long gone by the time they started looking. Sharon had paperwork to keep her in North Africa for days, and neither of them had anything else to do that evening. Given the looks Natasha and Sam had exchanged in the plane, they already had their own plans to use up the post-battle high. And if he asked Sharon over the commlink, Natasha would finally stop harassing him about the whole thing.

They caught the diplomat, but lost the files when the building collapsed. Natasha somehow managed to text Steve restaurant reviews while chasing down the aide and the translator, and Sam was practically leering at him when he touched down, spouting terrible innuendo mixed with more sedate comments about how relieved he and Natasha were that Steve was finally “ready to spread his wings.”

This was a good thing, Steve chastised himself, showering off the concrete dust and the smell of the chlorine gas HYDRA had tried to use. Sharon was attractive and smart, and being alone made his friends worry. The selfish, desperate part of him insisted that it didn't matter how nice she was, because he already belonged to someone. Steve flipped off the water and told himself to shut up. Even if Bucky wasn't dead, he didn't remember how things had been between them. He didn't remember.

Sharon was fine. And he only had to do this once.

They had dinner in a cozy restaurant by the shore, the lights of the white city through one window and the horns from the ships drifting in through the open glass doors. Sharon had acquired a revealing dress and a pair of heels, possibly from Natasha, who Steve firmly believed had some sort of strange power to produce things out of thin air. He ordered in French, and poured her a glass of wine. Two glasses later she must have felt good enough to break the awkward silence, and chatted to him about CIA training and dress codes and some of the non-confidential work she did. Sharon was at least as charming as her grandmother, and Steve had always been good at smiling in the right places.

Then a bullet shattered the far window and took out the waiter who had come around the corner with their food. “Get down!” Steve shouted, relieved that everyone in the restaurant seemed to understand French. Sharon yanked a gun out of her handbag and aimed at the remains of the window. Steve shook his head, gestured at the waiter on the floor. “Get him to a hospital, under guard,” he commanded, not bothering to wait for her nod before leaping out the window to follow the shot.

The rifle was still set up, on the roof of a building five blocks away. It was one of the ones they'd confiscated from the secret basement in the embassy earlier, Soviet made. There were no other marks, and Steve knew there would be no fingerprints. When he stretched out to look through the sight, he found himself staring at Sharon's chair. _Warning shot_ , Steve thought, and packed up the gun. When he got to the hospital, Sharon asked him why he was smiling.

~*~

 

The second time, Sharon hitched a ride with Natasha on one of Stark's absurdly lavish jets. Steve didn't want to stop, certain Bucky had been with them on the train to Yerevan, but Natasha promised she had fresh intel, and no one was going anywhere until she said so. Sam, thinking with a body part Steve chose not to name, agreed with her.

To his credit, Steve did try to say no when Sharon asked to spend the evening together. “I don't think it's a good idea,” he objected, perfectly honest, though none of the others knew that someone had nearly killed Sharon on their last date. “I think I might go to bed early,” he tried, when the first comment made Natasha's face fall, and Sam look more like a concerned counselor than a man who was about to have sex with the Black Widow.

“That sounds good to me,” Sharon purred, and Steve sighed and gave in. He would keep her out of any sight lines. And if the sniper fired at anyone else – Steve fought down the hope unfurling in his chest. If there was a sniper, maybe he'd stay long enough for Steve to find him, this time.

Sharon wanted to see Mother Armenia, but Steve quickly vetoed the idea of going anywhere outside, especially a public park that led to a war museum. He compromised when her expression thinned, and suggested they dress up like tourists. With hats, and possibly false mustaches. “Afraid of the Armenian paparazzi?” she replied, snickering at him.

“Someone's bound to take a shot,” Steve agreed. He didn't bother to clarify that he expected rifles - not smart phones - to be doing the shooting. She was a CIA agent, and a former SHIELD operative; she could handle herself. Besides, the butterflies swooping through Steve's stomach hadn't been there for seventy years.

He _wanted_ to go on this date. Sam and Natasha would be thrilled.

~*~

 

After a leisurely stroll through the park where the most threatening thing was a group of children who'd consumed too much sugar, Steve let Sharon hold his hand as they walked up the steps and into the museum under Mother Armenia. He waited, shoulders tensed, for the ghost to take aim, and completely missed the fact that Sharon had asked him a question. Three times.

“Hey!” Her tone went from cajoling to worried, and Steve's eyes snapped back to her face, trying not to scan the perimeter for a face he wouldn't see. “Are you all right?” She followed his gaze, spinning to take in the museum, and shrugged. “Not into war memorabilia?” Her concerned expression gave way to a lascivious grin, and Steve took a step backward. “We could go back to your place, instead,” she offered, draping her slim arms over his shoulders, whole body pressed against Steve.

The only shot anyone could get now had to be from the side, unless the sniper also intended to shoot Captain America. He calculated where a man would be, to make a shot to Sharon's temple, then jumped when his phone buzzed in his back pocket, just as his date tried to slip her leg between his thighs.

“Sorry,” he apologized, ducking out of her embrace and putting his phone between them. That would keep her at least arm's distance away.

**Natasha: Have a lead on the Winter Soldier. Get back to the hotel, ASAP. FYEO.**

Steve was out of the museum and down the steps before he'd realized that Sharon was still next to him. Mother Armenia glared down at them both, sword in hand. He looked down at Nat's text again, surprised by the surfeit of acronyms, more so by the lack of strange text faces. Sharon's face, when he raised his eyes, had transformed from seductive to a little irritated. “Mission?” she inquired, one hand resting on the purse where she kept her gun.

FYEO, the message had said. “Um.” Steve shrugged apologetically. “Not really government-sanctioned, these days. Sorry.” He spun on his heel, striding away faster than she could move, in or out of those heels. “Enjoy your evening!” he shouted over his shoulder, giving a half-wave and breaking into a run.

A lead on the Winter Soldier would explain why there had been no sniper tonight, no Soviet-made bullets whistling past Steve's cheek, making the blood sing in his veins. It wouldn't explain the prickling at the back of his neck, but that could just have been wishful thinking on his part. Captain America had always had more hope than brains.

~*~

 

Natasha's door was locked, but the front desk had already given him a spare key. “Nat?” he called, striding past the bathroom, still panting slightly from the cross-town run. “You said you had -”

He cut off in mid-sentence, throwing both hands over his eyes and trying to unsee what was right in front of him. Not that Natasha and Sam weren't beautiful people, artistically, or that the contrasts in skin and hair wouldn't make for an incredible sketch, especially when their limbs were woven together and Sam's hands were pressed to Nat's -

“What the hell is wrong with you?” the Falcon demanded, sounding more put out than Steve had ever heard. “'Do not disturb' wasn't just for the cleaning staff!”

Steve peered out between his fingers, relieved to find that his friends had pulled the duvet over themselves, though Natasha continued to shift in a way that Steve decided not to think about. Ever. “You texted me,” he retorted, placing blame where it belonged, waving the phone at them. “Told me to get back here. Now, are we leaving, or not?”

“Not,” Sam demanded, voice strained. “Definitely not.”

Frowning, Natasha leaned up and snatched the phone out of Steve's hand. She scrolled through the received messages, then scowled harder and scanned the room, stopping at the open balcony doors, clothes in a pile beneath the sheer, fluttering curtains.

“Damn it.” She stood up, leaving Sam with the duvet and leaving Steve to cover his eyes, again. A quick toss through their clothes brought enough Russian cursing to make Captain America disregard the fact that his friend was nude and raise his eyebrows at her in question. “My phone's gone. Someone must have gotten onto the balcony, an hour ago, at most.”

Keeping the covers tucked firmly around his waist, Sam reluctantly sat up and joined the conversation. “Could they have stolen it before that? We're on the fifteenth floor!” The look Natasha gave him would have cowed lesser men. Sam snorted, and held up his hands in surrender. “All right, all right, Spider Man stole it.”

Steve tried to swallow the smile tugging at his lips before speaking. “He wouldn't have climbed,” he corrected, moving toward the balcony. “He would have started at the top. Easier to go down than up, especially from a sniper's roost.”

Two incredulous faces stared back at him. Sam raised an eyebrow, sighed. “I'm gonna guess we're not talking about Peter, here. And could you stop looking so damn pleased about the fact that the world's top assassin just walked into our room while we . . . were too busy to notice.”

Natasha folded her arms, pushing up her breasts, lips pursed and pale face skeptical. “What makes you so sure it's him?” Her posture was defensive, but without clothes, the scar from a perfect shot was visible for them all to see.

Shrugging, Steve took his phone back and turned for the door, his skin tingling and his chest tight. He'd had a reason to look forward to this date, after all. “Enjoy your evening,” he told them, still smiling. “We head out at first light.”

Bucky stormed HYDRA plants from the roof, he didn't say. Captain America planned the entrance from the horizon, and his sergeant thought about the fall.

His phone buzzed again, as soon as he was back in his own room. Steve shed his shirt and slacks, headed for the balcony in the silk boxer shorts Natasha had replaced his normal stash of underwear with.

**Natasha: The woman touches you again, and she will lose her hands.**

The smile on Steve's face broadened, and he gazed into the night, straining to see into all the places where the stars met the city skyline. **I miss you** , he typed back, bare skin buzzing under the gaze of invisible eyes. **Are you watching?**

The reply came almost immediately, phone vibrating against Steve's palm. **Natasha: Always.** Moments later, when Steve did nothing but continue to grin like a fool, his phone gave an angry shudder. **Natasha: I am waiting, Captain.**

The laughter shook Steve's chest, ringing his happiness off the exposed balcony and out into the night. Steve's head felt light as he stripped off his boxers, his blood pounding and his skin sensitive to every breeze, the way it always was when Bucky watched. He could almost see Bucky's pale eyes, hear the quiet command in his voice, echoing through a thin-walled tenement, a canvas tent, over rooftops in an unfamiliar time. Steve stood naked, on display for the city, for shadowed blue eyes. Bucky commanded, and Steve obeyed.

~*~

 

The next morning, they tracked the phone to the roof of an office building a block from the hotel. It was still on, ringer on high, aimed pointedly at the balcony to a familiar hotel room.

Steve scooped it up before Nat could, deleted the blurry picture. He paused over the unfinished text, cursor still blinking on the glass screen.

**Remember who you |**

~*~

 

The third time was Steve's fault, and it nearly got Maria Hill killed. Five months had gone by, and they had more information than ever on the Winter Soldier, more HYDRA kills and intelligence for Fury. Sam kept a map of where they'd been, crosses for the battles, triangles for the abandoned facilities, a list of known HYDRA supporters growing longer down one side. Almost half a year, and no sign of the Winter Soldier, not even an extra bullet in a fight.

Steve had stood on balconies, had scanned the horizon from rooftops in Hyderabad and Dhaka, hotels in Nagoya and Shanghai. He had watched late spring fade to the monsoons of summer, sweltering heat fading to the chill of the air on an October day in smoggy Baku.

They weren't the only ones chasing the Winter Soldier. They weren't even the only ones who hoped to take him alive. Steve counted days, watched hours tick by, and started to lose hope. The Soldier had threatened to dismember anyone who touched Steve, but it was becoming clear that the Soldier was gone.

Then Hill flew through Ashgabat, working for Pepper, offering information from Fury and Nat. Offering Steve the chance to come apart under someone else's hands, without demanding that they stroll through the city, that they talk about nothing and kiss under the Arch. Hill knew how to give orders, and Steve accepted, leaving Sam at dinner for the promise in Maria's eyes.

They didn't kiss in the lobby, but Hill pinned Steve in an empty elevator and no one stopped her. He followed her down the hall to her room, the back of his neck exposed to hidden eyes that were no longer there. She ran her hands over Steve's chest, scratched at his scalp with perfectly manicured nails when he went to his knees and buried his face between her legs. She was sitting on the counter of the hotel bathroom, lacy bra still on, the smooth lines of her back reflected in the mirror.

Steve focused on following orders, on the feeling of hard tile against his knees, hiding his heartbreak under warm skin and harsh hands. He almost didn't hear her scream.

Her hands fell away from his head, giving him a second to glance up before callused fingers slid into his hair from behind, curled into a fist and jerked him backwards. The sudden force tore his body up and away from Maria, her taste still cloying on his tongue. Head twisted back, body bowed off the floor from his knees, Steve could see Hill's ashen face, the knife lodged in her stomach, the blood flowing from her slashed wrists. In the blood-spattered mirror, there was a glimpse of dark, ragged hair and pale eyes, inches away from Steve's ear.

“Nobody touches you but me,” the specter seethed, his breath warm against Steve's cheek, metal arm banding his chest.

Steve should have fought him. He should have tried to stand, gone for his shield or his phone, sought to capture or to get help for Maria. Instead, he sagged into the embrace, arching his neck into the assassin's hands. “Please,” he breathed, going utterly still. “Please.”

Then Sam kicked the door down and Steve crumpled to the bathroom floor, like a marionette with its strings sliced through. When the Falcon trampled into the bathroom, Maria's lifeless form was the only sign the sniper had been there at all.

Captain America stayed with her, in the hospital. He didn't tell any of them that it was because her slow-healing wounds meant that the Winter Soldier was alive. That he was watching.

~*~

 

Sam and Natasha refused to do anything else until Steve explained, as they put it, “what the fuck was going on.”

“Look, man,” the pilot started, sitting in the abandoned hospital waiting room at three am. “Your love life is your business. Until people start dying. You want to explain to us why _that's_ happening?”

Pacing the room, Natasha flipped a hand to dismiss her boyfriend's question. “The Winter Soldier has fixated on Steve. He's hunting him, stalking him like a predator. Toying with his prey.”

A staticky call for a doctor came over the speakers, and two nurses rushed through the room, disappearing behind the double doors to the operating room. Steve smiled, and rubbed his fingers through his hair. “Bucky doesn't like other people touching me,” he told them. When they both blinked at him, flabbergasted, he wiggled his eyebrows and smirked. “Sorry. Were you hoping to invite me to join?”

His friend made a noise like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, but Natasha only glowered. “He doesn't like people touching you, so he kills them? You think this is funny, Captain?” No, Steve didn't think it was funny. He thought about the crack of glass in a restaurant, the cool caress of a breeze across a hotel balcony, the blood on a bathroom mirror. Heat pulsed down veins frozen with ice from the Alps, making Steve shiver with the sudden burn. The pounding under Steve's ribs wasn't funny at all.

“Is this how your friend would have behaved?” Natasha challenged. “Would _Bucky_ murder anyone who came near you?” Someone had taken a lug wrench to Ike Bower after he'd tried to corner Steve in an alley one night. He hadn't walked for weeks. The Keogh brothers had thought Rogers would be easier to take than a girl, and too ashamed to tell anyone. Their cousin found them by the front door, teeth knocked out and testicles crushed beyond repair, stomped into the ground.

Steve was a terrible liar, and the answer written all over his face drew the Black Widow up short. “He would,” she murmured, stepping backward in surprise. Her tone changed, plummeting from the gale of her anger into a zephyr, breeze fresh with pity. “Did he hurt you, too?” she asked, the revolting insinuations painted in her eyes, in the tentative stretch of her hands.

Steve shot to his feet, hands balled into fists the way his best friend had taught him. Whatever Sam saw on his face, it made him tug Nat out of swinging range. “Let's get a few things straight,” he growled, trying to inhale patience into his lungs. “First, Bucky hasn't killed anyone who didn't deserve it, ever. You think Sharon wouldn't be dead if he wanted it, or that the waiter was _lucky_ to survive? You think he accidentally stabbed Hill in the stomach and not across the jugular? You're telling me the world's most successful assassin can't hit his target from less than three feet away?” He stared pointedly at the scar hidden under Natasha's blouse, and she looked down, covering the wound with her hand.

Braver than they often gave him credit for, the man who had lost his wings but still followed Captain America into HYDRA plants and exploding embassies and around the world stood up to face Steve's indignation. “This isn't normal, Steve. No one should be so possessive that someone ends up in the hospital. Barnes doesn't own you.”

In the reflection of a poster overflowing with flowers, Steve's rueful smile was colored with poppies and honeysuckle. “You've watched someone die,” he murmured, speaking to the wrist he'd encircled loosely between right finger and thumb. Sam's gaze went through the hospital wall, to an azure sky in Afghanistan, to a man floating beside him on a warm day. Natasha glared through the linoleum. They all knew how it felt, to see someone beside them fall. “Imagine having to do that every few months. Every few weeks, in the winter, watching what you love most in the world stop breathing and fade away.” Sam's fingers pressed hard into Natasha's hip, and he nodded. “Could you do that?” Steve queried, shaking his head. “I couldn't. Bucky held my hand through the flu. Pneumonia. The measles, and the mumps. The time they thought I had polio. Asthma so bad I fainted on the train. Scarlet fever that almost left me blind. He sent someone for the priest eight times. I've had last rites at least three.” The oil, pressed against his mouth, Bucky's fingers clenched around his hand, tight enough to bruise.

“When I wasn't dying, I was fighting. Determined to make a difference before the next disease – before the last one. So if he wasn't at my deathbed, he was mopping my blood out of an alley, flinging himself after me before some thug could rupture my spleen.

“I was killing him,” Steve admitted, soft as the tears Bucky hid in the couch cushions, piled next to Steve's bed on the floor. “And he couldn't take it. Could you?” But they didn't understand, had seen Captain America with a split lip and a bullet in his ribs, but never sickly Steve Rogers gasping for breath, body never meant to survive. “So he -” Steve shrugged. “- reminded me that I wasn't allowed to die.”

It sounded black and white, when he said it, like the old pictures of their neighborhood markets or the reels from the war. It didn't smell like laundry soap and the sweet smell of vegetables rotting, wasn't zucchini green and marigold yellow, with Mrs. Hendrick's orange hair rinse and Bucky's vibrant eyes when he'd pulled Steve close, nose still bloody from fighting in the alley behind the market. _Remember that I need you,_ a boy had said, the auburn streaks in dark hair lost in the sepia tones of the past. The sweat on his palms, the flush on his cheeks as he buried damp hands in straw-colored hair and pulled his best friend off the trash scattered through the alley and into strong arms. _Remember that you belong to me._

Another call for a doctor echoed over the silence in the waiting room, reverberating off tile and sterile walls. “Bucky's the reason I'm still alive,” Steve tried to explain, without pressing his wrists together and his knees to the floor, the whole world narrowing to a hand carding softly through his hair. “He would _never_ hurt me.”

~*~

 

The fourth time, Steve chose more carefully, limbs already trembling in anticipation. He and Sam had been following the HYDRA agent for two weeks, across Mongolia and into Kazakhstan. His picture, and his code name, came up again and again in the dossier that Steve kept under his pillow. Young, ambitious and brilliant, Andrei Volkov had leaped at the chance to control the Winter Soldier. Had switched loyalties from the Red Room to HYDRA, following his greatest achievement into new wars.

Volkov was too smart to be caught, but cocky enough that when Steve pretended not to know who he was and bought him a drink in Almaty, he didn't say no. His organization might be crumbling, thanks to two men and a ghost, but the agent had come to HYDRA's attention by taking risks. Risks like luring Captain America into bed with strong cologne and manicured nails, and hoping that Steve Rogers might be stupid enough to go to the restroom and leave his drink to be tampered with. Steve pretended to sip from the daiquiri he hadn't ordered, and feigned wooziness he didn't feel. He let the man pull him into the elevator, cataloging points of contact with a smirk the operative probably attributed to the drugs. Dick. Hands. Knees. Tongue. Chest.

The Soldier waited until Andrei had manhandled Captain America into the hotel room before he stepped out from behind the door, black greasepaint heavy around pale eyes. Andrei, not as clever as they gave him credit for, eyed the Winter Soldier with satisfaction when he should have tried to run. His penis was still jutting from his flies when the Soldier sliced it clean off. Steve would have winced if he weren't otherwise occupied, shaking from the feel of dark hair under his fingertips. Tossing Andrei's genitals aside, indifferent to his screams, the Winter Soldier lodged small dirks - no bigger than paring knives - into each wrist, severing the muscles to his hands. The knees cracked under blows from a metal fist, and the tongue joined the other organs in a gruesome pile on the floor. Leaning into Steve's touch over his ear, the Soldier tugged a larger knife out of his hip belt and buried it in Volkov's chest, fracturing bone and ending the agent's gurgled pleas.

“Stay?” Steve begged, hooking the pads of his fingers into ragged hair, feeling it tug free when the Soldier pulled away. The strands settled around his fingers, the only proof besides Volkov's corpse and three bloody knives that Bucky existed at all. The window was open, and the Winter Soldier was already gone.

~*~

 

Attempting to lure Bucky out made Steve careless, willing to press himself close to strangers and wait for the whisper of a knife pulled from a sheath. That carelessness was what allowed HYDRA to catch Steve outside Lutsk, trapping him with the mark he had planned to offer the Soldier. When they tied him to a chair in the basement, it became clear they had played the same game, and HYDRA had won. “He will come for you,” the mark taunted, another operative involved in murdering Steve's best friend and creating a weapon. “He will come for you, and then he will be ours once more.”

HYDRA had Captain America for twenty-four hours, both of them waiting for the same man. They tortured him, because they could, because he was not meant to survive. They did not kill him, because he would make a good challenge for their programmers, to have the Winter Soldier terminate his childhood friend where he had previously failed.

In one moment, Steve was surrounded by men leaning in to taunt him, jamming tasers into his skin, using his limbs for target practice with pistols at close range. The noise was deafening, jeers drowned out by the roar of gunfire. Steve's eardrums were still ringing when it all went still. Ten HYDRA operatives lay dead on the floor, hands severed, decapitated where their heads had come too close to Captain America's blond hair. The Winter Soldier stood in the middle of the room, chest heaving, metal arm crimson up to the elbow.

“Bucky,” Steve slurred, jaw broken, vision beginning to fade. Bucky crouched down, smashing his fist against the handcuffs they'd used to bind Steve to the chair.

He'd never tied Steve up, before. There had never been any call to: Bucky could take him apart with soft touches and gentle words, press a hand over blue eyes and shut Steve off from the war, from their unpaid bills and his rasping breaths. Bucky could wrap his fingers around Steve's skinny wrists and bring the whole world down to a thready pulse against the press of forefinger and thumb.

“Who is Bucky?” the Winter Soldier asked, glancing up, his face spattered with blood and carefully blank. Then the Hulk broke down the far wall, the Widow scuttled in, and everything collapsed.

~*~

 

Steve spent a week in a private hospital room before they released him, another three days figuring out how to bypass Stark's technology and Fury's spies.

“I'm not sure how to explain it to you,” the Falcon told Stark, as Steve hunched over a tray filled with sedatives, wearing stolen scrubs.

“Is it sex?” Tony replied, looking bored. “Because I got that explanation a few decades ago. Though still several years too late, all things considered.”

Neither of them noticed Captain America, falling in behind the other staff hired by old SHIELD money and Tony Stark, headed for the only patient in the secure ward.

Sam sighed, and rubbed circles into his temples, elbows resting on his knees. “Partly, I think. But there's more to it than that. If you let Steve in there, he's probably going to help the Winter Soldier escape. He'll do whatever Barnes wants him to.”

The ID Steve had swiped from the nurse laying unconscious in the break room got him in the vacuum-sealed doors. The psychiatrists' logs had said that James Barnes had yet to speak at all, without encouragement from certain drugs. They said he appeared unaware that his current situation marked any change from the past seventy years. The concrete walls and thin cot made the Soldier's belief that he was still HYDRA's captive seem less like delusion and more like common sense.

“But why? Romanoff said that Brooklyn's favorite Soviet assassin doesn't even remember being Bucky Barnes.”

“He doesn't,” Sam agreed. “But he remembers Steve Rogers.”

They called it a hospital, but the room was a cell, cot pushed to one corner and bulletproof glass no more than a mirror from the inside. The Winter Soldier paced circles through the room, unbalanced by the metal arm hanging useless at his left side. When the door slid open he froze. Stared unblinking at Captain America, both of them in sea green scrubs, with bruising under their eyes. Despite prompting, the psychiatrists had written, the subject had thus far regained none of his memories outside of his time as the Winter Soldier. Prospects for recovery grew dimmer with each day, every drug-induced conversation. If the Soldier had ever been Bucky Barnes, it didn't seem like he ever would be again.

The klaxon sounded, blaring through the tile corridors and flashing red through all the rooms. Someone must have found the orderly whose scrubs Steve was wearing. “I know you,” Bucky whispered, louder than the alarm shrieking through the halls, lifting his right hand out from where it had curled at his hip.

Steve slid to his knees without thinking, pressing his head up into Bucky's outstretched hand, pushing his face into the hollow of a thin hip. “Yeah,” he breathed into the fabric of the pants that hung loosely off Bucky's hipbones, held up by a drawstring pulled taut above jutting bones. “You know me.” The world condensed to the feel of warmth against Steve's face, callused fingers dragging through his hair, putting soft pressure against his scalp.

“Do you remember?” Bucky sounded curious, as though those words hadn't been said to him hundreds of times by psychiatrists, turned into a prelude to pain and forgetting by generations of scientists. He wrapped his hand around the back of Steve's neck, tightened his grip enough that there was nothing but cool fingers and rough palm in Steve's world, the hum of Bucky's voice and the safety that left him boneless and calm.

“Of course I remember, Buck,” he murmured, letting his weight sag forward into Bucky's leg. Seventy years of holding his breath, holding his shoulders straight, surviving for the next battle because there was nothing else left that could make his heart pound, no one else that concentrated the world to a single point and let him be still.

Sam and Tony burst through the door, weapons raised, but Steve didn't spare them a thought. Bucky wouldn't let anyone near Steve who might hurt him. Bucky needed Steve to live, and Steve didn't live without Bucky needing him.

The Winter Soldier maneuvered slowly onto his knees, thumb brushing in soft approval against the skin behind Steve's ear. Steve slipped his right hand into the space between the nonfunctional metal index finger and thumb, letting their weight encircle his wrist the way a flesh and blood hand curled around the nape of his neck. Somewhere behind them, Tony squawked, “You didn't say Captain America was a _sub_ , Wilson!”

When Steve picked up his head, he met eyes darkened to a stormy grey by the same protective devotion they'd always held, even if the memories weren't there to explain why. But that was all right. The Winter Soldier knew how to keep Steve whole, knew how to make him feel alive. Steve could do the remembering, for a little while. “I remember that I belong to you,” he promised, resting his forehead back against a collarbone that pressed obligingly into his skin. Wrist. Neck. Forehead. Chest. Heart and soul.

“Always,” the Soldier agreed, brushing the word over Steve's temple, tightening his grip until Steve could finally breathe.


End file.
